Lebanon call for jihad largely ‘bluster’

BEIRUT: Inflamed tension in Lebanon will unlikely materialise in an all-out conflict according to analysts who say most political forces in the country have little appetite for renewed conflict. However, they say that Hezbollah’s decision to fight openly alongside the Syrian regime will increase Lebanon’s involvement in Syria’s conflict, despite a policy of neutrality.

“Hezbollah’s public involvement is no longer the world’s worst-kept secret, and now we are in a crisis where the Lebanese are not only politically divided... but also militarily divided,” Gassan Al Azzi, a professor of political science at the Lebanese University, told AFP. “Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian crisis now involves all of Lebanon because we’ve heard from the other side calls to fight jihad alongside the opposition to the Syrian regime,” he added, referring to Lebanon’s Sunni community.

This week, senior Hezbollah official Nabeel Qauq defended the group’s actions in Syria, where its elite fighters are reportedly leading the battle in parts of the Qusayr area of central Homs province near the border. For now, experts say, such calls on the part of Lebanon’s Salafists are largely bluster because the movement is far from able to wield either the arsenal or the fighting forces of Hezbollah.

“Talking without doing anything is less intelligent than doing something without talking about it,” Al Azzi said. But Wadah Charara, a sociology professor at the Lebanese University, said there was little reason to think the inflamed rhetoric would produce serious domestic instability for Lebanon. “The impact of the Syrian crisis on Lebanon is worrying, and there may be some incidents, but the general political trend is towards stabilisation and not upheaval,” he said. Charara, an expert on Hezbollah, said it was forced to publicly acknowledge its role in the conflict by the rising number of deaths among its fighters in Syria.

“It’s a ‘common sense’ policy. In the last year, the party has published photos of some of its activists killed in Syria, but the phenomenon gained momentum with the increasing number of deaths and burials. They couldn’t hide it any more,” he said.

According to Charara, Hezbollah has around 20,000 fighters, between 5,000 and 7,000 of them battle-hardened forces, and has deployed between 800-1,200 members to fight in Qusayr.